What determines how hot or cold you feel? My logical mind would like to believe that the ambient temperature decides it, but long experience shows it isn’t so. At home, we talk, for instance, about a “cold 19 degrees” or a “warm 19 degrees”, that is, you can feel warm one day and cold the next even though the temperature is the same on both occasions. A few days ago, the outdoor temperature stood at 20°C and I felt distinctly chilly whereas today it was a “baking hot 20 degrees”, perhaps because the sun was shining from a almost cloudless sky.

Chapel Market

We had business to conduct at a post office and, fortunately, there is now one such in Chapel Market. I don’t know when it arrived but it did and that’s all that matters.

The market itself was fairly busy, about average for a weekday, perhaps. There is now a fishmonger’s shop in the street and near it was a fish stall. Both if them stank if dead fish and I held my breath each time I had to pass by them.

I’m not particularly finicky about smells but since adopting vegetarianism many decades ago, I find the smell of meat and dead fish quite repellent. If meat eaters had the same response as I do to “edible corpses”, then they, too, would become vegetarian on the instant.

Amwell Street

Our next port of call was Amwell Street, named after Amwell in Hertfordshire which, with nearby Chadwell, lies at the source of the New River. From our explorations during lockdown, I have come to know the street better than ever before and therefore have become fond of it.

I called in at King’s Chemist’s while Tigger queued at Middleton’s deli.

Pulling down the shades

It was coming up to 10am now and the streets were divided between sunlit and shadowed regions. It was still comfortable in the shade but already too warm in direct sunlight. Even though this corner shop was still in shadow, the shopkeeper was pulling down the shades in anticipation of the shop becoming sunlit later.

Coffee in hand, we went straight home where we shall probably spend the rest of the day in the breeze from the electric fans.

Desk fan

I have this neat electric fan on my desk. It’s not hugely powerful but it’s good enough. Hitherto, I have turned it to point at my face but recently I have noticed that in this unusually hot weather, my PC becomes quite warm, so much so that parts of the metal become almost too hot to touch. I have therefore turned the fan to blow downwards across the keyboard area on the grounds that the computer needs it more than I do! It seems to have worked and the computer is now much cooler.